collecting

I don’t trust the dude on that Fibs ‘n Squibs cover.

filed under Categories collecting 8 Comments

So we recently obtained a bunch of these mini-books:


We’ve had other copies of these mini-books before…tiny squarebound booklets measuring about 5/8 by 7/8 inches, published in the mid 1960s. The format (at least in the superhero ones) was generally an illustration on one page with text on the facing page, though any attempt to actually read the darn things would risk the danger of, at best, cracking what passed as the spine, or possibly even pulling the entire booklet apart.

The line didn’t just contain Marvel superheroes, but other joke and story books as well, which are named here in this period article, and shown here in an article from the same publication a couple of decades later. It looks to me like this company, Creative House Publishing, licensed the properties from various comic publishers, mixed in their own in-house content (or obtained the joke and story and other content from sources I’m not aware of) and marketed them in this unique format via bubblegum machines and what have you.

Each title featured multiple variations on cover color…here you can see the multiple covers for the Nick Fury book. That brings me to this point: I had been under the impression, from information provided in Overstreet and online, and just from previously having copies of these in the shop before, that each cover was single solid color. You may have noticed that most of the covers in that first pic up there aren’t solid colors, like these two Nick Fury books:


And here’s a better look at one of the non-superhero presumed-variants:


I’ve not seen mention of these particular variations before. I doubt they’re counterfeits, because who’d go through the trouble, really? The person we obtained these from said that, according to his research, these may have been special promotional variations given to the distributors who handled these items, but I’ve yet to find confirmation.

And just for comparison, here’s a close-up of one of the covers with the solid color:


At any rate, I’ve done some research on these things, but apparently not nearly enough. If someone out there has more information on them, particularly regarding the significance of the spotted ‘n’ speckled cover color variations, I’d like to hear it.

Don’t worry, I’m reasonably certain this isn’t leading into another two weeks’ worth of Man-Thing posts.

filed under Categories collecting, giant-size man-thing 13 Comments

Some follow-ups to Monday’s Man-Thing post, because why not?

Chad asks:

“Out of curiosity, is there enough Man-Thing material to generate a second omnibus?”

There’s more Man-Thing out there…there was this short-lived ongoing, the serial from Marvel Comics Presents, assorted cameos, that one Giant-Size Spider-Man issue, I think an Iron Man annual, this thing, and so on. I don’t know if it’s another 1,200 pages, or anywhere close to justifying another omnibus, but it’s a not-insignificant amount of Man-Thing.

Also, the more I think about it, the more I am coming to believe that the omission of Marvel Two-in-One #1 from the contents listing I reprinted in my last post was simply an accident. It’s not impossible that they left that issue out for whatever reason, but it seems very unlikely. I’m betting it’s in there. …Well, not enough to bet $125 on it, but I’ll let one of you buy it and tell me for certain.

Richard adds

“And of course we may never see the reprint of the Man-Thing appearance in ‘Micronauts’ because of all the legal rights involved.”

And that’s a shame. I feel pretty safe in suspecting the solution is “money, and lots of it” but I doubt the financial return in obtaining usage rights to reprint one story would be worthwhile. But, heck, it’s not like that particular issue is too hard to find. Ask a comic book guy near you! Or even ask me…I’ve probably got one or three in our back issue assortment, somewhere.

Someone remind me to poke through my Overstreet when next I have an opportunity to see if these reprint-verboten issues are suddenly commanding slightly higher prices than their freely-reprintable comrades surrounding them in those particular runs. I think there’s a Hulk trade paperback just recently solicited that skips over this issue, and of course there’s that one issue of Power Man and Iron Fist that’s forgotten by God and man and Marvel’s reprint department. I’ll have to see if the stockpiles of those issues I’ve been investing in are sellable now…wait, what? No, I didn’t say that. Must’ve been someone else.

And speaking of Man-Thing…I don’t think I’ve noted anywhere on the site yet that Steve Gerber’s final Man-Thing script is seeing print in the forthcoming three-issue mini Infernal Man-Thing (starting in June), illustrated by Kevin Nowlan. Here is Nowlan’s cover for #1:


…which is one of three covers for that first issue, and you can see the other two in this Marvel.com article about the series. …No, I’m not getting every variant cover for this series. Why, that would be crazy.

Now here’s a hell of a thing.

filed under Categories collecting 24 Comments


So here’s a slabbed ‘n’ graded copy of Civil War #2, 2nd printing, that turned up in a box of unsold stock we acquired from another store. It’s an interesting artifact of a once red-hot comic book crossover event since supplanted by a cascade of other crossover events, themselves all secondary to the pursuit of the movie tie-in dollar which may or, more likely, may not trickle down from the cinematic breadwinners to their poor print cousins.

This particular edition itself is of note, a second pressing of the issue in which Spider-Man publicly reveals his secret identity, with a new cover reflecting said event to apparently take advantage of the real-world (as opposed to just comic book press) media attention. The revelation itself pretty much had “reset button” written all over it, and sure enough, shortly after Civil War was over and we were all on to the next thing, Spider-Man’s secret identity status quo was restored and thus, what small importance this issue had in the grand scheme of Marvel’s things was no longer what it was.

Currently, no one is really seeking out back issues of Civil War, and even the sales of the books collecting that series and its army of tie-ins have fallen the farther away we get from that event’s heyday. And now we have this…an item produced to exploit interest in a specific plot twist, since undone, in a Big Event Series, since…um, unbiggened, I guess.

This item’s only claim to collectibility at this point is that it’s sealed in a plastic slab, with an official condition grade assigned to it by a grading company. And, as we can see on auction sites and as used to be demonstrated by helpful graphics in the now-defunct print edition of Wizard Magazine, “slabbed” comics can often command much higher prices (or at least are set at higher prices) than the same comic without a slab.

If the story I was told of this item’s lineage is accurate, it was apparently offered, as is, slab and all, through the monthly distributor’s catalog as a prepackaged collectible. The price marked on the store sticker is $59.99, which is like twenty times the regular retail cost of the comic by itself. I was also told the item was ordered by mistake and could not be (or simply wasn’t) returned.

This is an empty collectible. Now, to be clear, I’m not accusing or blaming anyone for this. There was a time when this was possibly a viable item. There was demand for this series, for this particular issue, and interest was high in that plot development. And the graded ‘n’ sealed books are usually of interest to some collectors. However, you can infer a “sell-by” date on some items, and it’s reasonably clear this is one “collectible” that has outlived itself.

It’s my problem now, and hopefully I can get a few bucks for it on eBay.

I hope none of my potential bidders read this.

Just a quick note…

filed under Categories collecting, jack kirby 20 Comments

…since it’s very late, and I’m on the verge of nodding off at the computer, which is never a good sign. It’s been a long week, and a lot o’hours worked, my friends, so your pal Mike’s batteries are way low.

But it wasn’t all bad…I did, for example, buy a copy of this for a dollar, and now I have even more big ol’ nutty Jack Kirby pages in my home to enjoy. The best part of reading this comic thus far is the captions…it’s like the exact opposite in tone from the movie:


…explicitly explaining everything you just had to sorta figure out yourself while watching the flick. Not that parts of 2001 were all that crazy hard to understand, but still, it feels weird having it all spelled out for you.

And how about that airline food, am I right?

filed under Categories collecting, grendel 17 Comments

So since I’m sure you were wondering, I finally checked at the shop for those Grendel issues I skipped all those years ago, and it turned out we had them all save one. AUGH. …That’s okay, since the one we’re missing is easily obtainable on the eBay for next-to-nothing Buy It Now prices and usurious shipping costs, so I’ll get around to picking it up eventually.

I did finishing rereading the Christine Spar Grendel run (issues #1-#12 of the second Comico series, 1986-7), and…man, I’d forgotten about how crazy the Pander Brothers art was on this series. Well, okay, I actually hadn’t forgotten, but I was certain my memory of it was exaggerating just how out there it was, but nope, I was remembering it just about right. …That’s not a criticism of the art, by the way…it did take a little getting used to, and it is a bit on the wild side, but it would be hard to imagine this series drawn any other way.

I’m sure that’s just because I’ve had 25 years to let these comics swirl around in my head since I first read the things, but I do adore the look of these comics. It’s…well, it’s hard to explain, and I hope you folks understand what I’m getting at here, but in a strange way the art is both sort of dated and cutting edge at the same time. It has this retro “we have seen the future, and it is mid-’80s MTV videos for New Wave bands” look, while maintaining a level of fast-paced and occasionally shocking storytelling that compares favorably, if not surpasses, most superhero comic work on the shelves now.

Plus, those guys sure did like their big jackets:

Reader Tom commented on the “misplaced futurity” of this initial storyline, with the floating phones and flying cars and such. (It did get flatscreen TVs right, though, but that’s pretty much a gimme as far as tech predictions go…I mean, the viewscreen on Star Trek was pretty much a giant flatscreen.) It had me thinking about the exact timeframe for the story, which is mostly pinned on Spar’s comment in the first issue that television interviewer/personality Phil Donahue is “70, at least. More?” Since Donahue is 76 now, that puts the time of the story at about…well, today, or maybe within the last few years. Probably after 2004, as one of the supporting characters has a “FRANCE 2004” poster on his wall.

So yeah, flying cars aren’t commonplace in the real world, so Grendel‘s usefulness as an accurate indicator of social / technological development is pretty much nil. Sorry, gang! But seriously, would you want a world with flying cars? I’ve seen how people drive on the road, man…I wouldn’t want ’em in the skies.

Another thing that slipped my mind until I pulled these comics out for the Great 2012 Grendel Rereading Project was the fact that most issues of this particular series had wraparound covers. You can see the fronts of them here, but aside from this smallish scan of a later non-Pander issue, there doesn’t seem to be an online source showing the full covers. If there is one, someone out there let me know so I can point folks to those swell full images of the Pander Brothers’ work on the first twelve covers. (The rest are pretty good, too.)

EDIT: The comics.org link now has scans of the wraparound covers.
 

image from Grendel #5 (February 1987) by Matt Wagner, the Pander Brothers & Jay Geldhof

Now had they cast Angelina Jolie as Christine Spar for the movie, she would have played both Grendel and Grendel’s mother during her career.

filed under Categories collecting, grendel 13 Comments

So all this talk over the last few days about rereading your old comics, combined with a brief Twitter-chat with Awesome Hospital‘s Matt Digges, all on top of my finally rereading Mage: The Hero Defined (yes, I got around to it!), has put me in the mood to revisit Matt Wagner’s other major series Grendel.

My original exposure to the character of Grendel was as a back-up in the first Mage series, later collected in that graphic album I showed you two days ago. And then there was the forty-issue series from Comico, followed a few years later by multiple mini-series from Dark Horse, with the Devil’s Vagary one-shot from the Comico Collection and a Silverback mini-series (starring Grendel’s nemesis Argent) mixed in there, somewhere.

Also along the way, I’d acquired the original unfinished Grendel mini-series which was later retold in drastically different fashion in the Mage back-ups. I eventually sold those off, which I’m kind of sorry about, since I really did like those big, clunky black and white comics with their semi-amateurish but compelling covers…but they’ve all been collected, including the covers (and the actual debut of Grendel from Primer #2, which I never owned) into a hardcover, so maybe I’ll grab one of those to replace their loss.

Now, I’d read that forty-issue series, which picked up with the second Grendel (Christine Spar, “granddaughter” of the original Grendel Hunter Rose), which then proceeded to pass on the Grendel character to other characters as the series progressed, and the setting of the series was pushed farther and farther still into the future, and as that series ended and the continuity continued through the multiple Dark Horse minis…I eventually lost interest, it seemed. In fact, in a very rare occurrence in my years as a comics fan, I actually stopped reading the Grendel comics halfway through one of the mini-series (Devil’s Choices, from 1995).

Even though it’s been (urgh) seventeen years, I’m reasonably sure my decision to quit midway through that series had nothing to do with the solid creative team of Darko Macan and the late Edvin Biukovic, and more to do with just having had enough Grendel. Plus, the further away we got from Hunter Rose and Christine Spar, the less interest I had in the ongoing saga. However, now, with an impending rereading of all these Grendel comics planned, I find myself interested in picking up the last two issues of Devil’s Choices, as well as the two Grendel Tales minis that followed. In fact, I keep meaning to grab them at the shop, as soon as I (ha ha) have some free time at work.

My self-imposed Grendel hiatus was relatively short-lived, as just a few years later we returned to the Hunter Rose-era Grendel with the Black, White and Red anthology series, followed by another series in a similar vein a couple of years later, and a full-length Hunter Rose story in Wagner’s Behold the Devil mini in 2007-8. (In fact, I may have jumped ahead and reread that Behold the Devil mini Thursday evening, prior to writing this post.)

I enjoyed those later Hunter Rose minis. I liked the early stuff quite a bit, and I enjoyed most of the forty-issue series from Comico. …I honestly don’t recall how much I enjoyed (or didn’t enjoy) the follow-up Dark Horse Comics Grendel minis, as it’s been so long since I’ve read them. Thus, a good candidate for a rereading, I think.

So anyway, I’ve got my Grendel comics pulled out of the Vast Mikester Comic Archives, and they’re sitting here on my desk ready to be perused, and…hmmm, that’s like almost half a small comics box-worth pile of funnybooks, there. Thatsa lotta Grendel. …I’ll let you know how it goes.

This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive listing of every single Grendel comic, of course…there are the two Batman/Grendel minis, and that Devil’s Child mini from ’99 I somehow missed, and a Grendel novel…or two, maybe? I gotta do more research.

I’ll have you know I was writing this instead of reading Mage II like I was planning to do.

filed under Categories collecting, grendel 13 Comments

Related to my last couple of posts about rereading comics from your collection, is the purchasing of stories one already owns in trade paperback form. For the most part, I do try to avoid doing that, just for purely financial reasons. However, there are times when I feel compelled, like when they finally reprinted all of Len Wein’s Swamp Thing stories in the Roots of the Swamp Thing hardcover (and not just the ones drawn by Bernie Wrightson), or that Firestorm trade that had an appealing cover and put all those old comics on nice, white paper. That’s one way to get me to reread some of my old comics…give ’em to me in a new presentation that will make me want to look at them again.

Now, since I’m a Swamp Thing fan, I’m not going to get rid of my original Swamp Thing comics after rebuying the stories in collected form, because I have a sickness and I need help. But as has been my semi-regular habit, I will happily replace my original issues with collected editions…like, for example, the early issues of Sandman. There was a time when those early issues were in high demand and sold for crazy money, and when that slipcased set of three paperbacks reprinting the first 20-something issues was released, I was perfectly fine with selling off those issues, getting the slipcased set, and using the extra money for food, gas money, and well, okay, probably just more comics.

I’ve done that a few times over the years…I bought the Watchmen paperback collection when it originally came out, but it took my acquiring of the Absolute Watchmen oversized hardcover to finally get me to throw my original run on the eBay. And I sold off my original Dark Knight Returns issues when I figured I was perfectly happy with having the story in the Longmeadow Press edition.

Over the last day or so I mentioned the Starblaze/Donning editions of the original Mage series by Matt Wagner, and I thought I’d throw the cover of the third one up here on the site just ’cause:


Mage was another one of those series where I ended up buying the collected editions because they were just so nicely done and they were in a larger format (about 8 1/2 by 11 inches, versus the standard comic book size), which resulted in me selling off the original comics. Well, actually, I used those comics as trade bait at a convention, and, like with the Sandman comics I sold, used them to get even more comics, so the vicious cycle continued. The only slight problem with this is that the Mage series included Grendel back-ups, and I didn’t want to lose those, but thankfully there was this album collecting all those stories:


This has been reprinted several times in comic book sized editions by Dark Horse, but I think this larger-formatted collection from Comico remains my favorite version.

I think, ironically, my comics blogging time has taken the place of my comics rereading time.

filed under Categories collecting, grendel 16 Comments

Thanks for all the responses to yesterday’s post about what you’re currently rereading (or would like to reread). As expected, I was reminded of several other comics I’d like to revisit, but that’s okay…I may not have time now, but it’ll give me something to do when I retire when I’m, like, 85 years old.

Chad brought up an interesting point:

“…does anyone ever find themselves doing a re-read of a series they remember being ambivalent about, just to see if it’s still worth keeping?”

That’s a good question, I think…by and large, any series I was ambivalent about at the time I tended to drop from the buy list, so I don’t have a whole lot in that category. But there are certain series that I followed through thick and thin, like Incredible Hulk or the multiple Superman titles, that have had changes in creative teams, or storylines that didn’t feel like they were up to snuff. For example, the post-Peter David issues of the original Hulk run…I suspect they were perfectly fine Hulk comics, but my general impression from my reading them at the time is that they weren’t really a patch on what David had been doing with the character. Probably not a fair judgement call, and I think if I pulled those issues back out of the Vast Mikester Comic Archives and reread them, my assessment would be more charitable.

I made a joke in the title of yesterday’s post that my rereading of the ’90s Superman comics was solely to document the impact of the “Death of Clark Kent” storyline from…’93, I think? I was actually just giving them a reread because…well, I’d reread the Byrne/Wolfman post-Crisis reboot issues plenty of times, but had only given the later issues a single reading as they were issued (aside from the Death/Return of Superman issues, which are very rereadable strong serialized superhero storytelling), and I wanted to see how it held up as a continuing narrative. …Mostly, it maintains a fairly consistent continuity, which started to slip a bit once attempts to incorporate elements from the TV shows and movies, along with attempted rollbacks to pre-Crisis status quos, began to undermine the very reason the ’80s reboot was attempted in the first place. Not that I have any particular problem with that…I just think it’s an interesting phenomenon that I was able to watch as it happened, rather than piece together after the fact by researching back issues and investigating comics industry history.

Since yesterday I had a couple of folks mention “The Death of Clark Kent” as a real nadir of the franchise, which has me tempted to go back and look at it again. My memory of it is primarily a lot of running around and shouting and things blowing up, which to be fair describes a lot of superhero comics, so that doesn’t really bring anything to the table, there. My other memory is how this seemed the most blatant of attempts at grabbing some of that “Death of Superman” attention that had long since dried up. But I don’t remember hating this story, so perhaps I’ll look at it again and see if maybe if it was a storyline I tolerated more than enjoyed (much like how I discovered what I willingly put up with in some of the Superman annuals, last time I revisited some older Superman stories).

~P~ mentioned

“Oh, and something that I re-read many, many times… the volumes of Matt Wagner’s MAGE. VOl 1 is AWESOME! I can read that any time or place.”

That’s another thing…I’ve probably reread the original Mage many, many times. The sequel series I read as it was coming out, and then again after it was completed. And that was pretty much it. …Not because I didn’t like it, but…I’m not sure why. Just, like with the rest of my comics, I never found the time, I guess. There’s also the fact that I have the original series in those beautiful Starblaze/Donning paperback editions, the only decent reprinting this series ever received, sitting on my bookshelves and easily within reach. Not to mention the fact that series has also been out for quite a bit longer, granting more time for rereading, particularly in my younger days when I had more time to read these darn funnybooks.

(Of course, in the midst of writing this I went down to the Archives and pulled that second series out of my boxes and I’ll get around to reading it again, soon.)

This sort of falls under Chad’s question, I suppose, but another Matt Wagner project, Grendel, is one of those comics where I really loved the earlier issues, but it…kind of lost me once the series got into the distant future and…well, if you read the comics, you know what I mean. I tried to keep up with the multiple Grendel Tales minis but just eventually lost track and interest (at least until the various Hunter Rose-era minis popped up years later). I think I just stopped reading halfway through one of the series. I wonder if I went back now, I’d appreciate those comics a little more? I’d like to think so. …Ah, well, just add those to the reread pile, too, I guess.

Well, I was wondering how the repercussions from “The Death of Clark Kent” played out over subsequent years….don’t you judge me.

filed under Categories collecting 31 Comments

It used to be that I had plenty of time to pull out full runs of something from the vast Mikester Comic Archives to reread. But, as time wears on, and I get older, and more things come to occupy my free time, I don’t get around to doing the full rereads as often as I’d like. Sometimes I barely have time to read all the new comics I get each week, and I don’t even really get that many.

Now, when I’m talking about “rereads” I don’t mean the occasional single issue or mini. I just reread the Preacher mini-series The Saint of Killers just the other day, for example. I mean, rereading full runs of a particular creator, or storyline, or a full run of an extended finite series. Like the Brian Azzarello run on Hellblazer, which, when I reread it a few years ago, held together better when read over a relatively condensed period of time, rather than one chapter a month over a couple of years where some of the nuances of storytelling can be lost. (An argument for “waiting for the trade” if ever I heard one, I realize.)

The most recent of the longer rereads I did was the full run of Planetary, which occurred right after the long-awaited release of the final issue. And the most recent Swamp Thing series. And prior to that…geez, I seem to recall rereading all the ’90s Superman comics, which seems like an odd thing to do to oneself.

But I’ve been wanting to do more rereads from the Archives, which has become an even more imposing task as the older I get, the more comics I have, and the more I have to choose from when it comes to The Rereadering. Plus, one of the effects from working in a comic shop is regularly coming face-to-cover with comics that I’d read and enjoyed in the past. “Hmmm, that wasn’t a bad series, and it’s been a while since I’ve read it…I should dig those out.” Like, for instance, the various “America’s Best Comics” – Top 10, Promethea, Tom Strong…I’ve had a couple friends in the process of picking up the trades for these, and that’s sort of given me the itch to look at my own copies.

The other thing is that I recently reorganized and relabeled our Marvel and DC back issue boxes…not the ones on the tables on the floor (that’s a whole other reorg project I’m not looking forward to), but the less-current series we keep up on the shelves behind the store counters. And that reminded me of several titles I’d like to revisit…like the initial issues of Infinity Inc., drawn by Jerry Ordway and featuring the younger Earth-2 heroes versus the Justice Society. Or the Martian Manhunter series by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake…a moody, slightly spooky superhero series from the guys who were just fresh off that Spectre series that now I feel like I want to reread, too, just from mentioning it here.

On top of all that, pal Tom recently dropped off some old Cerebus Fan Club material, including a few of the newsletters:


…which (along with the Moment of Cerebus weblog I’ve been perusing) of course made me slightly nostalgic for that time when I eagerly awaited each new issue of Cerebus, hoping for more adventure and intrigue, more gags, more clues to the ongoing mysteries, more wacky letters page hijinks, and…well, things went in an…unexpected direction in the later years, but I still have plenty of fondness for the series. I think one of the earliest topics on this very site was my desire to go back and reread the full run of Cerebus now that the last issue, #300, had finally come out. I never did get around to it, but those 300 issues (well, those six volumes of Swords of Cerebus and the 275-something other issues) are still awaiting my attention, so I’d like to get to that someday, too.

The flipside of this is, of course, the series I don’t really need to reread, and yet I’m keeping them around anyway. I probably don’t need to go through and reread all of the original Swamp Thing series from the ’70s, and the follow-up series from the ’80s and ’90s, as I’ve read those all plenty of times. That doesn’t mean I won’t bust out a single issue once in a while to enjoy, but and extended reread from #1 to the end probably isn’t in the cards for while yet. (I do wonder what new things I’ll pick up, however…which is always the most pleasant benefit from a reread.)

And there’s Sandman, which I read to pieces as it was coming out, and I think I did a reread of the entire series shortly after it was done, but I don’t see myself going through the entire series again anytime soon. But I did like the series, so I will likely revisit it at some point. Though, come to think of it, I think I’d like to reread the Sandman spinoff The Dreaming.

Of course, there are series coming out right now that are on the verge of completion, like The Boys, which I think will benefit from a reread over a short period of time, much like the Azzarello Hellblazers I mentioned earlier.

To summarize: I have too many comics. But I love ’em and would like to read them more often than I really have time for. One of the things this blog does is get me to go through my collection and look at some of the comics that have been sitting there in boxes for a while…I dig through them, looking for things to discuss or poke gentle fun at or simply just throw onto the site to appreciate. So maybe I’m not plowing through full runs of, say, the Garth Ennis Punisher (damn, another one I want to reread!) but at least I’m still looking at my old comics and doing something with them.

…Are any of you in the process of rereading old comics from your collection? Or are you in the same boat, wanting to go look at some old funnybook run or ‘nother and just never having the free time to devote to it? Feel free to let me know…which of course will just remind me of more comics I’d like to go back and look at, and wouldn’t that just figure?

Yes, I know people were trying to rip each other off with those DC treasury reprints of Golden Age books back when they were new.

filed under Categories collecting 7 Comments

In response to yesterday’s post, reader Philip asks, in reference to the new bunch of first issues heading our way from DC Comics:

“So how long, do you figure, before someone calls you with ‘I have a mint-condition Action Comics #1 to sell’ and they show up with the re-numbered Grant Morrison book? (Apologies if you’ve addressed this already.)”

I think it’s been noted once or twice here and there, but I think if I discussed it, it might have just been on Twitter or something. But that could be a problem, but I don’t imagine it’ll be an issue for quite a while. These new number ones are too obviously new, and whenever that particular problem you mention has ever come up with us, it’s been among older comics, like DC’s treasury-sized 1970s reprints of Golden Age titles. (Or between Superboy #1 and Superboy Annual #1.)

I suspect, in about ten or twenty years, assuming the continued existence of stores dealing in these stapled paper things, the current spate of starts and restarts and renumberings will result in no small amount of befuddlement for future collectors. I suppose ultimately the new DC #1s for their long-running titles, like Batman, won’t necessarily be a specific problem in that people will confuse it for the original #1 from decades ago, but will simply add to the morass of recent first issues already out there. And there will be plenty of #1s to go around for folks to attach their spurious dreams of found fortunes, like the debut issues of Cyber Force and Team Youngblood that pop up in nearly every collection that passes through our doors. “Look, I have first issues” they say, hope briefly in their eyes ’til I tell them the terrible truth.

However, in fifty years? Seventy-five years? As we get some distance from the current marketplace and (making a huge leap here) assuming there is still a comics market as we understand it…maybe some people in the year 2081 will confuse a Superman #1 from 2011 for being the original and try to get some big bucks (or Galactic Space Credits) for Superman’s “first” comic book. I’ll update my blog in about 70 years and let you know if and when that happens. (Or if it occurs earlier than that, which could very well happen. It wouldn’t completely surprise me. Well, it would if they did use Galactic Space Credits.)